Hard white wheat outlook improves

Consumers like it. Millers
like it. Foreign buyers would like more of it. But U.S. wheat growers have been
reluctant to expand their hard white wheat acres.

Many haven’t forgotten what
happened the last time hard white wheat grabbed headlines. Growers who took a
chance on the new crop found meeting the protein requirements difficult. Even
if protein levels met a buyer’s specifications, producers couldn’t get the
wheat to that buyer because country elevators didn’t want to handle a
low-volume class of wheat that had to be segregated.

But that was 25 years ago,
and times have changed.

Chris Cullan’s family passed
on the chance to grow hard white wheat when it first came to western Nebraska
in the 1980s, but they added hard white to their crop rotation five years ago.
Early varieties just didn’t yield as well as the hard red varieties growers
were accustomed to.

During the intervening
years, wheat breeders worked to eliminate yield drag and to improve end-use
quality traits.

“Yield pays,” says Cullan. “The
first thing any producer looks at when choosing a variety is yield and the
ability to turn that bushel into dollars.”

Gordon Gallup, who farms
near Ririe in eastern Idaho, agrees. He has grown hard white wheat nearly every
year over a decade. Yield drag has not been an issue on his dryland farm, but
he has seen his neighbors with irrigated land struggle with hard white
varieties when they try to plant after harvesting potatoes or sugar beets.

Still, weather conditions
can thwart even the most careful managers. Growers with hard red spring wheat
that doesn’t meet protein specs can blend it with other hard red spring wheat
and find a market for it.